SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Six golfers have won the career Grand Slam and on Father’s Day 2026, on the day he turns 30, Scottie Scheffler has the chance to become the seventh. Through three rounds of this 126th U.S. Open, here at Shinnecock Hills, Scheffler is one under par and in a four-way tie for second, six shots behind the 54-hole leader, Wyndham Clark.

Should Wyndham Clark win this tourney? Of course he should. But there’s something not-quite-right about the word should, and there’s something not-quite-right about big leads on Sundays at majors. They can get in the leader’s head. They’re unreliable.

Clark, winner of the 2023 U.S. Open, has led after the first, second and third rounds here. Leads get heavier and heavier. Big leads get heavier yet. Three days of windblown golf can make your head rattle. The leader’s long wait for a mid-afternoon tee time can lead to wayward thinking.

This is all a ’round-about way of saying that Scottie Scheffler’s chances of winning his first U.S. Open on Sunday, and completing the career Grand Slam, are not totally remote. Would a win from him be a longshot? Of course. But not an impossible-shot. A Sunday 66 could be enough. Golf is a numbers game, and, of course, a head game. You can’t separate the two.

“I think it’s appropriate to understand what’s at stake,” Scheffler said early Saturday night, with Clark still on the course. The sentence is such an insight into how his mind works, about his ability and desire to take things straight on. “I’ve worked really hard for a long time to have a chance to win golf tournaments and to win major championships. I think understanding the moment, and giving it your best shot, is all part of the process.”

The man was faking nothing. The man fakes nothing.

Ernie Els was watching from home, in South Florida. In his World Golf Hall of Fame career, Els won two U.S. Opens and two British Opens. He loves Shinnecock Hills, with all its rattles and rolls, with all its nods to “Golf in the Kingdom.” He likes Shinnecock’s deep beach-sand bunkers and its grasses that present in every shade of brown and green. Shinnecock brings two Open rota courses, or two in particular, to mind for Els: Royal Portrush, where Scheffler won the Open last July, and Muirfield, where Els won the 2002 Open.

Els knows something that Scheffler may find out on Sunday: the mindset, and the skillset, that paves the way to a British Open win can pave the way for a U.S. Open win. Not any U.S. Open win. A U.S. Open win at linksy Shinnecock Hills.

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“I think the Sunday setup will favor Scheffler, I think it’s better for his higher ball flight,” Els said. The Sunday pin positions are likely to be far more demanding than they have been so far, and the course is likely to be, by far, its firmest. The harder the course, the better for Scheffler, and any chaser. The prospect of completing the career Grand Slam, Els said, will be a positive for Scheffler.

Tiger Woods needed three years to win the career Grand Slam. Jack Nicklaus needed four. Gary Player needed seven. Ben Hogan needed eight. Gene Sarazen needed 13 years. Rory McIlroy needed 14. If Scheffler wins on Sunday, he will have completed the career Grand Slam in four years — four years and two months, to be precise — and he will have done it on his first chance. He won the Masters in 2022 and ’24, and he won the PGA Championship and British Open last year.

“It may look like a links golf course because there are no trees and you have that kind of grass, but I don’t think it necessarily plays like [a links course],” Scheffler said. “You can hit a few linksy-type shots, but overall, the ball is still played in the air on this golf course. The ball needs to be hit up in the air, especially to hold these greens.”

So, in conclusion, combining Els’s commentary and Scheffler’s: On Sunday at Shinnecock, we’re going to get some of both, British golf and American golf.

Scheffler and Clark are in the day’s last twosome on Sunday, off at 2:30 p.m. Clark will be playing, on some level, to make us all forget about how he bashed in that locker at Oakmont last year.

Scheffler is playing for something far more glorious.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com.

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SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — To say the things that Ángel Hidalgo does with a golf club are akin to what Picasso did with a paintbrush would be an insult to Hidalgo. Such is the depth of the 28-year-old Spaniard’s golfing creativity.

High cuts and low draws? Hidalgo could hit them blindfolded. Drivers off the deck, hooking spinners to tucked pins and sawed-off, flighted wedges that check harder than Magnus Carlsen? Yep, Hidalgo, whose father and grandfather were both golf pros, also has all those bits of wizardry in his arsenal.

Close followers of the DP World Tour, where Hidalgo has won once (2024 Open de España), will be familiar with Hidalgo’s shot-shaping prowess, as will regulars on golf Twitter, where clips of Hidalgo’s inventive shot-making often make the rounds. After Hidalgo carded an eye-popping 63 at the Irish Open last year, he said, “I feel for a few moments like I was playing in a PlayStation.”

This week here at Shinnecock, Hidalgo is playing in his first U.S. Open and just his third major overall. On Thursday, he made five birdies and shot 69. On Friday, he made three more and signed for a 74 to make the cut by two and make some personal history.

“I’m so happy to be in a weekend finally in a major,” he said.

In brutal winds Saturday, Hidalgo opened with back-to-back bogeys before getting a stroke back at the par-4 4th, where he spun back his approach to a foot. Hidalgo hadn’t yet delivered one of his signature how’d-he-do-that shots, but it was coming. After finding the right side of the fairway at the par-5th, Hidalgo had 268 yards left to the hole. Time to go full Ángel.

Fairway wood in hand, Hidalgo wound up and hammered down on his ball, his follow-through stopping at shoulder height with his clubface pointed skyward.

“Trying to play a runner,” a voice said from the booth. “This is an interesting shot.”

Ingenious was another word. Hidalgo’s ball rocketed off the face, stayed low and out of the wind, before touching down and catching the left side of the left-to-right slope in front of the green. The ball rode the wave like a surfer in a pipeline, coming to rest 30 feet right of the hole, from where Hidalgo two-putted for birdie.  

After Hidalgo’s round, GOLF.com showed him a video of the shot and asked him to explain how he did it.

He smiled.   

“I try to imagine I’m playing a links course into the wind and just try to hit as low as I can, pretty straight and be really focused, because that shot was wind from the left,” he said. “So it’s easy for me to, to over-cut it. I just try to feel a little bit maybe on the toe and punch it, and maintain very low [flight]. The the bounce was pretty good. It was a great shot.”

Hidalgo said he talked through the shot with his caddie, Álvaro Alonso, and they agreed he needed to land his ball on the left side of the fairway so it would roll onto the green.

“It’s a little bit imagination,” he said.

I asked Hidalgo how often he employs that sawed-off move.

“If you see a video of me, on YouTube or whatever, with my driver and woods, I’m…”

He paused and laughed.  

“If you think Scottie Scheffler moves a lot, you didn’t see my swing yet.”

Hidalgo, who shot 74 in the third round and is seven over for the week, will need a lot more magic if he’s going to put a scare into the leaders on Sunday. As of this writing, he was 13 back of Wyndham Clark and eight back of Clark’s closest chasers, who are at one under.

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SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — As TV cannot do justice to the peaks and valleys of Augusta National, neither can it capture Shinnecock Hills — not as it played on Thursday, with a heavy wind coming off the Atlantic, over beachfront mansions and across Sunrise Highway, before sweeping across the old William Flynn course here. The Thursday round of this 126th U.S. Open was all set up for another USGA Shinny set-up screwball comedy, except it never happened. The opposite. The players . . . liked it.

They liked the speed of the greens, the hint of moisture they retained all day and into the night. (Play ended at 8:25 p.m. with 50 players still on the course.) They liked the width of the fairways (often 50 yards wide!), the first-round pin positions (no holes on weird knobs!), the tee positions (no surprises!). They liked player parking (almost on the 10th tee), the food in player hospitality (beef tenderloin and fresh pizza to go), the purse ($22 million!). There was a lot to like and nothing to dis.

“The USGA did a great job,” Keegan Bradley, last year’s U.S. Ryder Cup captain down the road at Bethpage Black. Bradley shot 70, even par.

A great job!

When was the last time anybody swaddled in Tourwear said those words?

Certainly not in 2004 and 2018, the last two times the U.S. Open was played here. At those Opens, nothing like that was said, not even by Retief Goosen, the ’04 winner, not even by Brooks Koepka, the winner in ’18.

“The conditions were tough,” Koepka said Thursday afternoon after shooting 73 in the first round of his 13th U.S. Open. He’s won the event twice. “It’s weird how soft the greens are. It’s odd. It’s not what I remember. I understand why they’re soft. I get that. [I’m] not complaining.”

Not complaining!

Rory McIlroy started on the 10th hole, his tee time delayed by two hours, on account of fog brought on by a shifting wind, Wednesday night into Thursday morning, and with it a dramatic increase in humidity. (In a day, this sand-splashed South Fork of Long Island went from late spring to mid-summer.) McIlroy was two under through three holes and but finished with two bogeys, on 8 and 9, for a 69. And even after that rough finish McIlroy was not moaning.

“It’s a challenging course already and then you put 30 mile-per-hour winds on it,” McIlroy said. “I think they were prudent with the course setup.”

Prudent!

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McIlroy’s day was certainly made more pleasant by having two Ryder Cup teammates, and lovely gents, as playing partners, Tommy Fleetwood, who shot 70, and Ludvig Åberg, who shot 69. Play was brutally, absurdly slow. It took the threesome, all fast players, nearly five hours and 40 minutes to play.) At least, starting as they did at 9:52 a.m., they knew they would complete their first round.

McIlroy & Mates were announced at the 10th tee by David Jacobsen, a veteran USGA volunteer and the winner last year of the organization’s prestigious Joe Dey Award. Jacobsen is the kid brother of Peter Jacobsen, the veteran Tour player and broadcaster, and the players, one after another, got a warm greeting from the starter. It may sound like nothing. It’s not. The players are playing in the U.S. Open. They’re tense. They don’t want to see a starter who is nervously looking at his watch every half-minute. A little chill goes a long way.

Jacobsen was at his post, ready for the day’s first group, well before 6:30 a.m., a cold fog all around him. Ten hours later, his workday was over. But in the final hour of his workday, he called the names of a bunch of former U.S. Open winners, including Dustin Johnson, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Gary Woodland, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm. Those guys caught the day in a gorgeous, golden late-day light, but the wind was not abating. There was sand in air and sometimes in their eyes. Flagsticks were shaking. Over the course of the day, and now and again, a hat went flying. The standard bearers were angling their scoreboards on considered angles, to slice through the wind. There were few spectators left on the course, at this witching hour. They were spent. The players were spent. The caddies were spent. A LIRR diesel train whistled on by.

It takes hundreds of crew members and USGA officials employees working long days to get these events — and this event — to a Sunday-night trophy presentation without getting called out for this or that or some other thing. On Thursday, Mother Nature had her mercurial say, and the USGA knew how to handle her.

Three more days.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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